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Screw the Food Network. I’d rather eat chocolate-covered ramen-noodle bars whipped up by the host of white-trash Internet cooking show Starvin’ With Louis. The low-rent creation of Mike Pecci and Louis Scheele, two penniless filmmakers who share a Brighton apartment, Starvin’ With Louis is Viva la Bam overthrowing The Naked Chef, a comic masterpiece for anyone who’s ever had to scrape together a meal out of leftovers and whatever else is lurking in near-bare kitchen cabinets.

"We were sitting around on a Tuesday, like really bored," recalls director/producer/editor Pecci. "Lou came in and made ramen-hot-dog chop suey. I was like, ‘That is the most repugnant shit I’ve ever seen.’ Lou ... sat down and ate it, and was like, ‘It’s pretty good.’ And so I said, ‘Well, the next time you do that, I want to film you doing it.’"

Pecci uploaded the edited footage to his personal site (www.mikepecci.com) and sent the address to friends. The hot-dog-and-ramen video lit up enough in-boxes last May that Collegehumor.com then posted a link and the video got 70,000 hits in three days. That one-off became the first of three and a half episodes of Starvin’ With Louis (and led to projects like producing/filming the Unseen video for "You Can Never Go Home.")

A burly "hardcore kid" (Pecci’s words) with a parched wit, braided beard, and deep-abiding love for PBR, Scheele is actually something of an amateur chef, having once worked in the kitchen of a steak restaurant — a job he credits with teaching him "what flavors go together." But Scheele’s cooking style is entirely his own. Tablespoons are trumped by instinct. A wok is his hearth. Booze and hot sauce are his culinary cure-alls. White speckles of indeterminate origin found on the cutting board are "flavor."

But that’s the point of Starvin’ With Louis, inasmuch as there is one: Scheele prepares dishes that sound completely gross, but actually taste pretty good — and for cheap. On the show, he invents trailer-trash delicacies like ramen Chex Mix and ranch-flavored French-toast fries. In one episode, Scheele invites a SuicideGirl named Sid over to hang out with him and his roommate Aaron, drink "poor-man mimosas" (Steel Reserve 40s mixed with OJ), and help Scheele bake Spam cupcakes with instant-mashed-potato frosting. In another, he goes fishing in the Atlantic Ocean with a two-person crew, catches no fish, and feeds his boatmates a prepared "lunch-fast" of egg salad and ramen party mix. The only one on the trip who gets seasick is Pecci — also the only one who doesn’t eat Scheele’s food.

The afternoon I’m at the apartment to interview Scheele (and guest-star on his show; see www.starvinwithlouis.com/starvinepisode_phoenix.html), he’s spent $16 on ingredients for a four-person-plus-leftovers meal christened the "Luau Extravaganza Burrito with Lava Tortillas." It’s a Hawaiian-style brown-rice-filled sundried-tomato wrap of canned pineapple chunks, pepper-jack cheese, ginger-flavored sweet-and-sour sauce, sprouts, carrots (none for me), cilantro, and Treet (Armour Star’s 99-cent version of Spam). (There will be no more Spam on Starvin’ With Louis: Scheele says Hormel saw him use rival-product Treet for sandwich meat and sent him a free case of Spam, but once the Spam-cupcake episode went online, the company saw how hammered Louis and his co-stars got and reneged on their sponsorship.)

Today, roommate Aaron and I are the burrito guinea pigs, so we plop down at the kitchen table, underneath a poster of toilet-cam stills. On the show, cameraman Pecci is an invisible voice, but here he can be a puppeteer. Like when he challenges Scheele to eat a stray pineapple lump that’s fallen on the floor. Or when he, ah, baits me into saying on camera that I was molested by an onion. Don’t ask.

At one point during a cooking lapse, I ask Scheele about his four months working as a strip-club bouncer in New York State; he tells a story about how he was once jumped by guys he’d kicked out and who later recognized him — at the supermarket in the toilet-paper aisle. I also discover that the online-cooking-show star doesn’t have a strong sense of taste — a childhood prank left him with chemical burns in his nostrils and he has no sense of smell. The show hits a minor catastrophe that involves paper towels sticking to most of the tortillas (mine luckily escape unscathed), so when Scheele sits down to eat, there’s actually paper-towel skin clinging to his burrito. He eats it anyway.

"I actually have some trouble coming up with some recipes because I want them to appear horrible and then turn out to be good," admits Scheele, having already explained that he’d originally wanted to make Treet-filled lasagna with sauerkraut today, but Pecci told him no.

"Lou’s biggest problem is that he’s a really good cook," Pecci adds, pacing around the kitchen, the camera finally at rest. "He’s stuck now in a show where he has to make food that sounds fuckin’ terrible. He wants to make these fancy things. And I’m like, ‘Dude, sounds too good. Gotta be crappier.’"

Watch Starvin’ With Louis at www.starvinwithlouis.com.